Press Release

SANDRA GERING INC is pleased to present JOHN F. SIMON, JR.: Endlessly Expanding, a solo exhibition of new wall sculptures and recent works on paper. The exhibition coincides with the book publication of Drawing Your Own Path: 33 Practices at the Crossroads of Art and Meditation, as well as an off-site exhibition of related sculpture at Racine Berkow Associates in Long Island City, Queens, opening on October 16th.

Endlessly Expanding adds to Simon’s ongoing 'expansion' series. Begun in 2010 on small cards and drawn daily, the series has grown into a significant body of large-scale CNC reliefs and works on paper. The current exhibition pairs highly engineered carvings with spontaneous and improvisational marks, often in the same piece. Mirroring his career-long dedication to artistic growth and restless search for imagery with open-ended yet resonant meaning, Simon’s output has recently crystalized around specific themes: breakthroughs in the creative process, unchecked growth, impermanence of self, and ultimately, trust in improvisational drawing.

On Nov 1, 2016, Parallax Press will release Simon's newest publication, Drawing Your Own Path: 33 Practices at the Crossroads of Art and Meditation, an account of how the artist’s daily drawing became a meditation practice, and how that meditation illuminated his creative source. A practical guidebook full of Simon's own art, Drawing Your Own Path offers artists a way to mindfully examine and deepen the source of their own creative ideas. A book signing by the artist will take place at Sandra Gering Inc. in the same month.

Simon is one of the pioneers in the development of Software Art and is renowned in this area for articulating the use of code in digital and multimedia works since the mid 1980s. This early community of artists and curators created the first wave of software applications, web-based projects and digital approaches to art making, which continue to expand in new directions every year. Simon’s artworks can be found in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Phillips Collection and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Simon holds an MFA degree from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and a Masters degree in Earth and Planetary Science from Washington University in St. Louis.